Fabienne Muff

Fabienne Muff, an engineer from Lucerne, studied mechanical engineering at the ETH Zurich with a focus on renewable energies and robotics. After her studies, she gained professional experience at various companies such as Pilatus Aircraft and ABB as well as in IT, including at Sunrise. Nowadays, the nature lover serves as CEO of Climacrux, the startup she founded in the carbon dioxide removal industry. The internet platform “Carbon Removed” enables individuals and companies to remove their CO2 emissions from the atmosphere – an important contribution on the path to climate neutrality.

With her startup Climacrux, founder and CEO Fabienne Muff is committed to a climate-neutral world. She explains what carbon dioxide removal is all about, the biases she faces, and the effect Covid-19 has had on environmental protection. 

Fabienne, can you explain how carbon dioxide removal (CDR) works?

CDR is pretty much what the name suggests: the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. We call this negative emissions. Negative emissions are greenhouse gases that are taken out of the air or water and permanently stored. There are many different methods for doing this. One example is direct air capture and storage. One of our partners – Climeworks – uses this technology. In collaboration with the Icelandic company Carbfix, they filter CO2 directly out of the air using large filter machines. This CO2 is then pumped underground where, through mineralization, it turns to stone and is stored long-term. Another example is enhanced weathering – an acceleration of natural weathering – which also uses chemical processes with CO2 and rock. Then you’ve got bio-oil injection which sees bio-oil produced from bio-waste pumped underground and stored in caverns where fossil fuels used to occur naturally. There are many more techniques besides the three CDR methods mentioned.

How does your platform “Carbon Removed” come into play here?

Our digital platform “Carbon Removed” enables individuals and SMEs to remove the CO2 emitted by their lifestyle or production using different CDR methods. We offer the following options: customers can purchase any volume of negative emissions to purchase once, or subscribe to offset their carbon emissions each month.

What are the advantages of CDR compared to carbon credits?

When you buy carbon credits, you reduce the amount of CO2 produced but you don’t remove anything that’s already in the atmosphere. So there aren’t any negative emissions. Of course, reducing CO2 emissions is a good thing in principle. At the same time, simply reducing CO2 will not be enough. It won’t let us become climate neutral because there is already far too much CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean. This is the big advantage of CDR, which allows us to clean up the remaining footprint already out in the environment.

What are the biggest challenges for the CDR industry?

In my opinion, the biggest risk is that too little money is flowing into our industry. The reason for this is “blame shifting”. It works something like this: the average person blames the very wealthy for too-high CO2 emissions. The rich blame it on a few large corporations. Big corporations blame it on the government. One government blames it on the government of another, more powerful nation, and so on. But none of this helps because if one thing is clear, it’s that the climate crisis won’t be solved by pointing the finger at others. We need to act as a society because every single person can make a difference.

What are the critical arguments you often hear?

Due to “blame shifting” and, as a consequence, the modest funding available, our industry is still in its infancy. In this context, people also like to criticize CDR technologies for removing too little carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and say that we humans produce much more than that. To make the various methods more efficient and be able to retrieve an even greater amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, we need sufficient funding. We at Carbon Removed are very grateful to our customers because their money contributes significantly to the further development of CDR technology. Apart from that, I often have to educate people when I am confronted with myths or false assessments by individuals or even companies. These misconceptions vary widely, such as the idea that I as an individual would not produce any CO2 at all, or that you just have to plant lots of trees to save the climate.

As a result of the Covid crisis, have you noticed a change in thinking around your company with regard to the urgency of environmental issues?

Basically, I feel that climate change took a bit of a back seat for many at the beginning of the crisis, including our target customer groups – individuals and SMEs. Unfortunately, you don’t always feel directly how climate change is hurting you as you do with coronavirus. That’s why the focus at the beginning of the Covid crisis was understandably firmly on this novel virus. However, along the lockdowns, I noticed that many people began to think about the environment. From a place of isolation, people’s desire to reconnect with nature increased. This led society back toward the issue of environmental protection and, as a result, to our startup. Within our target group SMEs, it’s important to remember that there are also companies that benefited during Covid, for example from accelerated digitalization. These companies are naturally more willing to put money into sustainable environmental protection.

Do you think this closeness to nature is a long-lasting trend, a “new normal” so to speak?

Humankind is unfortunately very good at repressing things. So with everyday life finally back, it is easy to lose interest to some extent in a sustainable world. For some people, that will certainly be the case. On the whole, though, I am positive and strongly believe that a large portion of the population will remain interested in our climate. The media also have a positive influence. Their increasingly broad and detailed reporting on climate change in all its facets helps in the fight for a sustainable world. In any case, I will continue to work with Carbon Removed for a planet worth living on. It is possible for humanity to live in harmony with the environment. And that’s a future I want to fight for.

Where do you want to be with your startup in the near future?

We want to ensure that CDR gains the upper hand over carbon credits in the future. This will involve, among other things, explaining the principle of CDR to our target audience in a simple and understandable way, and demonstrating the advantages of the approach over carbon credits. We would also like to be able to finance as large a portfolio of CDR technologies as possible to drive this approach and make the solutions more efficient. This would in turn bring about a reduction in costs. We are also pursuing the goal of making it as easy as possible for individuals and companies to achieve climate neutrality. To do so, we’re continuously working on optimizing our offering. This includes not only straightforward purchasing of negative emissions via our platform, but also integrating them into other products and services. One of our future projects pursues the goal of enabling people to remove the CO2 footprint of a purchased product or service directly, at the click of a button. At Galaxus or Zalando, for example, this option is already available, only with carbon credits. But this is not the same as effectively removing the footprint of that particular product through CDR. So we remain ambitious and continue to go full steam ahead.